Aaron has a nice editorial piece on going from zero-install to instant-install in which he discusses the notion of web apps: Bringing back a lightweight notion of installation offers an interesting way out of Web constraints. If an author uses APIs like window.open() and desktop notifications in an annoying way, his app will be uninstalled. Read the rest…

“A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.” said the cowboy John Wayne. Mozilla’s new intern with the same name knows that Mozilla needs to do… and it needs to do performance. It isn’t just about JavaScript performance though, the battle for the hearts and minds is perceived performance. This is a Read the rest…

Using the mobile Web with modern devices that give you the “full Web” and allow you to zoom in and out on the page (if zooming hasn’t been turned off of course). Sam Stephenson (of Prototype and 37Signals fame) has taken on the problem of the sizing of controls. If you zoom out, normally, controls Read the rest…

Sergey Chikuyonok has created a really nice, easy to use, and good looking content assist library for input text fields and text areas: It calculates precise position of characters in <textarea> or <input> tag and places completion proposals popup under it. You can explicitly call popup window to assist/replace word (depends on caret position) with Read the rest…

Progressive enhancement. Disconnected offline applications. There is a tension brewing in how we deliver applications on the Web. This isn’t a new tension. It has been around ever since we started to do more than just throw HTML down the pipe for the hypertext document runtime to render. With the Ajax revolution we talked a Read the rest…

As I walked around Moscone last week, I saw some prophets speaking of a future that isn’t all Native. A future where the Web is the platform. Others saw it too: I pondered who would be behind the act and smiled as I had a good idea. The group behind this all is the newly Read the rest…

We have a screwed up tensions on the Web. The size of your source code really matters for performance. The larger your .js…. the longer it takes it to get down the pipe. This has a perverse incentive to write terse uncommented code. Add to this the problem of having to work cross browser, and Read the rest…

I checked out this new POC app called Booktorious by August Lilleaas. It’s actually pretty neat in that it’s a 100% client side web application that reads EPUB books. So I jumped over to epubBooks and downloaded Through the Looking-Glass just to see how far down the rabbit hole I could go with this (sorry Read the rest…

Raphaël. Painter. Turtle. One the back of the fact that Raphaël will continue to do great things in the JS space due to Sencha Labs funding we have another little gift. 104 MIT licensed icons: Go check out the page and zoom in to see the vector goodness.

Whenever you name your company after your first product you run into the issue that people think that is who you are. The company behind ExtJS has grown up a lot recently, and partly to show that, now come to you as Sencha, a new identity. They have also clearly separated their GPL/commercial offerings from Read the rest…